Lucille Clifton received a Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970 and 1973, and a grant from the Academy of American Poets. She received the Charity Randall prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and an Emmy Award. Her children's book Everett Anderson's Good-bye won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award. In 1988, Clifton became the first author to have two books of poetry named finalists for one year's Pulitzer Prize. (The award dates from 1918, the announcement of finalists from 1980.)[21] She won the 1991/1992 Shelley Memorial Award, the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and for Blessing the Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000 the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry.[22]
From 1999 to 2005, she served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. In 2007, she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the $100,000 prize honors a living U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition". When awarding Clifton with this prize, judges remarked: One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton's poems—it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don't."[18] This testifies to Clifton's reputation as a poet whose work focuses on overcoming adversity, family, and endurance from the perspective of an African-American woman.
In 2010, Clifton received the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.[23][24]
